The Materials Division in the Aerospace Technology Directorate of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)-Lewis Research Center has a distinguished history of contributions to advanced materials research and development. Located in Cleveland, Ohio, the Lewis Research Center was originally built for aircraft piston engine research during World War II as a part of NASA's predecessor, the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics. After the war, with its need for immediate engineering solutions ended, attention at Lewis turned to a variety of more fundamental research problems. As early as the 1950s, a portion of the experimental effort at Lewis sought new materials to withstand the extremely high temperatures within turbojet engines. The needs for materials to withstand ever more severe temperature/environment extremes continue, and recognition of these needs, in part, motivates the current materials research effort at NASA-Lewis. The Materials Division structure reflects the strengths as well as the diversity of research areas being investigated. Each of the eight branches making up the Materials Division is briefly sketched below.

The Microgravity Materials Science Laboratory is a unique facility with the purpose of allowing industry, university, and government researchers to prepare for materials processing experiments to be done in the “microgravity” environment aboard the Space Shuttle.

The Advanced Materials Institute (AMI) is the materials research arm of the Colorado Advanced Technology Institute (CATI), a state agency created in 1983 by the state General Assembly as an economic development initiative involving academic, industry, and government sectors. AMI represents a unique process in academic research: long-term materials needs of industry members are addressed by university investigators, with federal agencies providing the major source of funding.

AMI is a consortium of four research universities (Colorado School of Mines as the lead institution, Colorado State University, and the Universities of Colorado and Denver) and a present industrial membership of nine corporations (AMAX Inc., Adolph Coors Company, Digital Equipment Corporation, Gates Company, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Manville, Martin Marietta, and Telectronics). The Institute is governed by a Board of Directors with representatives from each participating organization. Sustaining memberships, which do not include representation on the Board, are available; memberships of both kinds are open to non-Colorado-based companies.

The long-term materials needs of industry members provide AMI's research agenda; many items, once identified, become company-shared interests. Requests for proposals, based on the agenda, are distributed to the affiliated universities for competitive awarding of seed funds. Proposals receive peer review and the Board selects those to be funded.